The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead · 2016
The Underground Railroad made literal: an actual railroad beneath the South becomes a machine for exploring every American nightmare about race, freedom, and systemic oppression. Whitehead's prose is controlled and formally audacious. A landmark of American literature and the book that announced the decade's most decorated novelist.
The case against
Each state is a new allegory, which turns the novel into a series of dioramas Cora walks through; she witnesses more than she lives, and stays at arm's length the whole way. The literal railroad, the book's boldest stroke, mostly idles offstage after its reveal. Whitehead keeps the prose at such a cool remove that the horror arrives refrigerated.
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